Industry expert reveals the secret to customer success in the cloud

Business transformation is crucial to survival in modern industry as new technologies revolutionise the way we operate. Lee James, CTO EMEA at Rackspace, discusses how the company is helping its customers accelerate their value to the cloud and ensure they have the right support in place for their transformation journey – critical to cloud success.

What
has been key to Rackspace’s success?

Primarily, the key is our culture. We have identified that
any efforts to build a culture of trust between business and customer will be
meaningless if the same principles of trust and transparency are not reflected
within the businesses’ own ethos and working culture. By creating a
customer-centric in-house culture, we can offer a fanatical experience to our
customers across the business, no matter what the touchpoint or service. An
example of this is one of our customer services team members was helping a
customer and when in conversation, they heard that the customer was going to be
in the office for a while and would miss dinner at home. The Racker bought the
customer a pizza and had it delivered to their desk. This is just one example
of how we thrive to provide not just fanatical support, but a wholly fanatical
experience for our customers.

The second factor
is our evolution. We have gone from a competitor to a trusted partner of the
global public cloud players, like GCP, AWS and Azure. Unlike most service
providers – and certainly the big cloud players – we take a wholly unbiased
approach to cloud migration, so our customers know that we are advising them to
take the cloud platform that will achieve the best outcome for each project.

The company recently underwent a strategy and brand shift towards becoming a technology services company. How does this new strategy reflect changing customer demands?

Our recent rebrand has really been a shift to thematically
underpin what we’ve known for a long-time. It is the secret of our success: we
put the customer first. We wanted to bring to the fore our philosophy that
places both customers and trust at the core of our business. We want our
customers to understand and celebrate that no matter who they engage with at
Rackspace – whether that’s a technical specialist, customer service agent or
the billing team – they will have a fanatical experience centred around
enabling their success.

It also reflects the massively diversified services that our
customers are now demanding from us as they look for guidance in areas that
Rackspace isn’t historically known for, such as our Rackspace Application
Services (RAS) that have been built out through the two recent acquisitions of
Relation Edge and TriCore.

Ultimately, IT environments are getting harder and there is
no way for CIOs and IT Directors to be experts in every new enterprise
technology and understand how it can be best applied to their business. Our
customers continually look to us – and challenge us – to support them in
closing the gap between the complex reality that is their IT environment today
and what can be achieved tomorrow through new technologies and practices. Part
of our rebrand is celebrating the ability of the Rackspace professional
services team in supporting our customers throughout their Digital Transformation
journey, whether that’s cloud migration, introducing DevOps practices or
application management.

However, it’s not all change. As
part of the rebrand, we have retained and refocused on what we know is most
important for our customers – accelerating the value of the cloud. Cloud
migration remains a ‘critical’ or ‘high priority’ business initiative for most
business leaders, but the challenges of predicting costs, execution complexity
and delivering on the vision remains a challenge. Where our strategy hasn’t
shifted with the rebrand is our dedication to ensuring that we support our
customers throughout their cloud journey and help them continually optimise
their estates to ensure that they continue to drive value.

What
are the biggest challenges and opportunities your customers are currently
facing?

Rackspace works
with businesses across their entire Digital Transformation process – of which
the goals and outcomes can differ significantly between industries – so it’s
hard to point to a few key challenges or opportunities that our customers are
facing.

However, to draw on a couple of examples, we have some customers whose business is doing so phenomenally well that they need support in ensuring their IT infrastructure is able to support it. For example, Boozt is one of the fastest growing online fashion and beauty companies, which found the demands on its systems were increasing in line with its popularity – particularly around peak periods. To support the company’s small team in managing the growth in and influxes in traffic, we worked with Boozt to migrate to Google Cloud Platform. This helped it manage a 40% hike in customer visits over this particular period – equating to around 50,000 new customers – without a minute of downtime or any performance issues.

Whereas for Trading
Point, a large and well-established international investment online brokerage
firm, the internal IT team needed to focus on driving value back to the
business’ core competencies, so the company started looking for a strategic
partner to take on the management of hardware infrastructure and support the
firm in
the maintenance of its systems. High reliability and low latency are key to
ensuring that Trading Point is able to continuously deliver its superior
service to its customers. So, for Rackspace, the challenge lay in ensuring that
the IT infrastructure was scalable, optimised and secure.

Rackspace recently announced a significant expansion of
its operations in Europe. How do these European markets differ and why did
Rackspace choose to expand in these areas?

Last year, we
announced that Rackspace would be embarking on its most ambitious EMEA
expansion plan to date, investing heavily in growing its footprint in Germany
and Northern Europe – something that I am personally very excited about.

One reason for this
expansion is that we’ve seen massive demand from German
companies for local expertise, as well as having the breadth, depth and
scale to support them at every stage in their cloud journey. Traditionally in
Germany, many firms have been slower to start out on their cloud journey and
with their high focus on data security and privacy, having that local support
and expertise has been an important factor to reassure them that they’ll still
be able to provide the same level of service and data protection to their
customers.

In the Netherlands,
however, the market is a little more mature, with many companies having already
embarked on their cloud journey. With our customers in this area, we saw
heightened demand to support them as they take their next steps on their cloud
adoption journey and in helping them understand how they can use it to improve
sales and drive greater revenue.

What
trends are impacting CIOs the most and how is Rackspace supporting customers?

One of the biggest challenges CIOs
face is ensuring they’re able to deliver value from their cloud and Digital Transformation
projects at cost. A recent global survey of business and IT leaders
found that several years into their migration, 40% of businesses said their
cloud migration costs were still higher than expected.

Ensuring that our customers are able to use their budget to best accelerate the value of the cloud in their organisation is key. One way we’re assisting them with this is through the launch of our new subscription cloud model, Service Blocks. This works similarly to bolt-on data plans, where you can increase your service based on your immediate needs. For your mobile this might be more data to entertain your kids on a long car journey, in the cloud this could be providing additional expertise to support you in a specific project – whether that’s a ‘Cost Governance as a Service’ or ‘Solution Architect as-a-Service’ to build complex cloud architectures.

Lowering the barrier to consume these new services will enable our customers to accelerate their value to the cloud and ensure that they have the right support when embarking on more complex tasks. Six week waits for statements of work are now dead. We know our customers crave flexibility, the ability to scale up and down and customisable offerings – whether that’s in their operations, resource requirements or service engagements – and that its ultimately critical for their success in the cloud.

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